Grace & Peace!
On the other hand, making a living in the arts is quite difficult. In New York, it can be particularly vicious.
I don’t know your brother’s situation, his ambitions, etc. Nor do I know yours. But from what you’ve written, I’m going to assume that your brother’s art is not an avocation but an actual vocation. I don’t know if he’s any good, if he has talent or vision. I don’t know if he’s accepting the money from your parents as a first step in getting himself established in an incredibly competitive field in which any leg up is particularly useful. But assuming that he has talent, vision, ambition and a plan, removing the support he receives from your folks may scuttle the plan, douse the ambition, deaden the vision and lead to the talent being squandered.
I have no particular love for hipsterdom and generally see Williamsburg as self-parodying or something of a joke, the butt of which are the affluent indolent. However, I’m conscious that that’s a very convenient stereotype. And while my ambivalence toward hipsterism is both political and aesthetic, I have no doubt that there are genuine artists living and growing there.
And let’s face it, our culture could care less about the arts. We would prefer something more practical–probably something involving numbers. Figures. Data analysis. Spreadsheets. If someone must be talented, let them be talented in secret and suffer like the rest of us. As a culture, we’ve a curious relationship to the beauty and provocation of art–we don’t quite know what to do with it and wish, I think, that it would just go away. This makes things very difficult for artists.
But, to be honest, I don’t think practicality is a particularly useful thing here, at least not in the way it’s generally understood. We are always far too practical for own good. When I hear of someone’s friend who was a double major in theater and economics, let’s say, I figure they’ve likely become an accountant. The moment one has a dream or a vision and then says, “I must be practical, I must have a failsafe” is the moment the dream is put off. Because pursuing the dream is ultimately difficult. And the moment the dream gets hard is the moment we employ the failsafe. At which point the dream is over. And for the most part, it’s inevitable–devising a plan B is an excuse to avoid the hardship of plan A. Most of the great artists did not have a plan B. Their need to produce art drove them inexorably onward to do whatever was necessary for them to be able to express themselves as clearly and uncompromisingly as possible.
That having been said, I don’t think the issue here is one of practicality but, indeed, of responsibility. But not responsibility in the sense of “being a responsible adult.” If your brother is an artist, a real artist, he is not responsible to or for whatever version of him you would like him to be. If he is an artist, his chief responsibility (after his responsibilities to others engendered simply by virtue of his humanity) is to his art which will require of him a network of additional responsibilities relating to his relationship to the world. Insofar as he is meeting these various responsibilities, I don’t think you have cause to quibble with your brother over how he lives. Financial independence is not the governing value here. You cannot ask a painter to live the life of a stockbroker. You cannot ask a pharmacist to order his life as if he were a writer. The same rules simply don’t apply. As William Blake wrote, “One law for the lion and the ox is oppression.”
However, if your brother is not an artist, if he’s a dilettante, an amateur with no further ambitions, if his art is a hobby, not an obsession, a need, a ruling passion, a harsh taskmaster–then he’s a fraud, quite simply, and your parents need as much of a talking-to as he does.
My two cents.
Under the Mercy,
Mark
All is grace and mercy! Deo gratias.
